Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday August 04, 2012 @12:45PM
from the hope-spacex-rocket-rides-are-cheap-by-then dept.

ananyo writes "In a feature that recalls Asimov's Foundation series and 'psychohistory', Nature profiles mathematician Peter Turchin, who says he can see meaningful cycles in history. Worryingly, Turchin predicts a wave of violence in the United States in 2020. Quoting from the piece: 'To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator-prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analyzed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. 'I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,' he adds."
We recently discussed similar research into predicting violence in the short term.

One can learn a great deal about Statistics by having multiple Statisticians perform multiple predictions based on a series of datasets with reduced sample sizes, all the way down to one sample.

(un)Surprisingly, the prediction accuracy is only very weakly related to the dataset accuracy, and varies wildly between predictioneers. One can thus conclude that Statistics are Statistically worthless.